The essence of the road trip is the knowledge that you're only passing through a place that has been there long before you came, and will still be there long after you're gone... It is names on a map coming to life in front of your eyes... It is making small talk with strangers you meet at petrol stations in the desert... It is walking through the rooms of houses that were abandoned long ago.... It is taking pictures of the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets silhouetted against the evening sky... It is singing along to Tom Waits' "Ol' 55" while driving into the sunset.

It is a journey that is never finished, for even if you may come back home and stay there for some time, you're itching to get back onto the road again.

We now have a time frame for the road trip around France and parts of Belgium and Germany. We'll meet in Hamburg and take off on the 3rd of September and be back on the 14th or 15th of September. Timing depended on my best friend, because he'll be graduating from university this summer. I'm going to plan my archaeological assignments around that trip (probably working six or seven weeks before and three or four weeks after the trip), and my friend from university who'll be joining us left it up to me to decide when to go, because I'm the only one of us who's got a car. His girlfriend wanted to come along, too, but instead she has to do two months of practical training.